Google announced it today Duet AI for developersthe suite of AI-powered assistance tools for code completion and generation announced by the company earlier this yearis now generally available and that it will start using Google’s more powerful Gemini model in the coming weeks.
While integration and code generation tools have quickly become dominant, with GitHub’s Copilot leading the way in terms of developer knowledge sharing, Google is taking an interesting approach here, also partnering with 25 companies that have contributed datasets for their platforms to help developers build and troubleshoot their applications. Confluent, HashiCorp and MongoDB, for example, will provide data to train Duet AI for developers to help developers write code for their platforms.
Image Credits: Google
While data from these partners will mostly be useful in the code completion and generation experience, Datadog, JetBrains, and LangChain will provide documentation and knowledge sources that will likely be most useful in the Duet AI for Developers chat experience. Using this data, the service will be able to provide development and operations teams with information on how to build test automation, solve problems in production and remediate vulnerabilities, for example.
“I still pretend to be a developer and lead a team of engineers who deal with developer relations and all of our documentation,” explained Richard Seroter, the chief evangelist for Google Cloud, in a small press briefing ahead of today’s release. “We see every day, there’s still a lot of work, there’s still a lot of difficult things about the software. How can artificial intelligence help us get rid of those pesky, things we don’t like to do? How do we improve coding? That was a lot of what we were chasing with it. How do we build the kind of AI assistant that meets our developers in the tools they use, but also rubs a little bit of Google on it?”
Image Credits: Google
How do you rub some Google into these tools? By ensuring that the model is trained on the latest cloud practices and by integrating it into the Google Cloud Console, for example, on top of all the popular IDEs that developers already use.
Seroter emphasized that Google is looking at the entire family of Duet AI products, with Duet AI in Security Operations now generally available as an enterprise-grade product with business access controls and Google’s indemnity guarantee that gives businesses the that they need to use them. tools in production.
Google’s overall story with AI coding tools is essentially the same as every other vendor. Seroter pointed out, for example, that completing code in IDEs that developers are already familiar with helps developers stay in their flow. Like most other vendors, Google also doesn’t believe that these tools will replace coding skills, but that they will help developers become more productive. GitHub and others have shared data on the productivity gains they share, and I expect we’ll soon see more data from Google on this. For now, the company has only said this Turingan “AI technology services company,” saw a 33% increase in productivity after adopting Duet AI for developers.
Duet AI for Developers currently supports more than 20 languages, including C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Python. In addition to the usual coding features, it also includes support for AI log summarization and error explanation built into Google’s Cloud Logging, for example, as well as Smart Actions, which Google describes as one-click shortcuts to perform tasks such as creating unit tests.
Until the end of January 2024, Duet AI for Developers will be available for free. After that, it will cost $19 per user per month with an annual commitment.
